How well does TIME’s CEO of the Year Neal Mohan, knows his own company? Check if you can answer these trivia questions
YouTube chief Neal Mohan, named TIME magazine’s ‘CEO of the Year 2025’, competed head-to-head with a YouTuber to test each other’s knowledge of Google’s video sharing platform.
In a fun social media video made for the release, the Indian ethnicity executive showed just how well he knows his company by going head-to-head with ‘Challenge Accepted’ host Michelle Khare in a round of Trivia Tube. Read on and check if you can answer all these trivia questions correctly:
Testing Neal Mohan’s YouTube knowledge
YouTube chief Neal Mohan and Youtuber Michelle Khare joked around and tested each other’s knowledge of YouTube in a quiz video posted on Instagram. Here’s how they proceed:
How was YouTube designed before it became a video sharing platform?
Asking the question to Khare, Mohan said that he knew the answer to how YouTube was developed in its early stages, but did not know the name of the product in the first stage.
“Honestly, I only know YouTube as today’s video sharing platform. Maybe before that it was a blogging site. I’m just taking a wild guess here,” Khare surmised. To which Mohan replied: “That’s a good guess, but it’s not true. It was a video dating site (so I knew that part), but I didn’t know it was called Tune In, Hook Up.”
What is the name of the first video published on YouTube?
Answering this question correctly, Mohan shared that the name of the first video published on YouTube was “‘I am at the zoo’, a 19-second video uploaded 20 years ago by Jawed, one of the founder-engineers.”
Khare added: “He was one of the first engineers on YouTube and I think he has over 300 million views.”
The video, posted on April 24, 2005, is still available on YouTube and has received more than 376.7 million views and 18 million likes as of writing.
Which viral video inspired the term virality?
Khare answered this question with a “wild guess”; He said it was “perhaps a science video about how fast viruses spread.”
Mohan called it a good guess, “but wrong,” and then offered the answer: “That was ‘The Evolution of Dance.’ It’s been a long time coming. I think it’s been 15 years at this point.”
The 19-year-old clip on YouTube has reached over 1.4 million likes and 314 million views as of writing.
WATCH: We tested how well YouTube CEO knows YouTube
In the TIME feature, Mohan said he was focused on one thing: running YouTube. “The entire dynamics of the media industry are changing before our eyes… It’s incredibly disruptive, and if you don’t adapt, you can be left on the sidelines. The fundamental North Star of how I think about content policies and moderation on YouTube in general is to give everyone a voice,” he said.
Neal Mohan – YouTube’s ‘quite’ and ‘hard to confuse’ CEO
In its Dec. 8 announcement, TIME magazine described Neal Mohan as a “quiet talker, a negotiator, hard to confuse.” Neal Mohan has served as chief product officer of YouTube at Google since 2008, taking over from founding employee Susan Wojcicki before becoming CEO in 2023. He is also a director on the board of directors of the coffee chain Starbucks.
Born in Indiana (Lafayette), Mohan moved to Lucknow (India) with his parents in 1985 when he was 12 years old.
According to his LinkedIn profile, Mohan graduated from Stanford University with a degree in Electrical Engineering in 1996 and received his MBA from the same Ivy League school in 2005, where he was an Arjay Miller Scholar. The Arjay Miller Scholarship at Stanford Graduate School of Business recognizes outstanding academic achievement in a program among the top 10% of the graduating MBA class.
Mohan is also an advisory council member of the Stanford GSB and the Council on Foreign Relations.
